‘If an artwork fails to make people feel its dissent, it is essentially lifeless’: Chinese artist and activist on the importance of confrontation | Eye News
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has long rejected the belief that art can exist in isolation. Rooted in lived experience, where the personal and the political are often inseparable, his practice over more than three decades has consistently responded to the manner in which power shapes memory and history. A leading figure of the Chinese avant-garde in the ’90s, he found himself frequently in conflict with state authority and emerged as one of its most prominent dissident voices, particularly after leaving China in 2015 and taking up temporary addresses in Berlin, Cambridge and now Montemor-o-Novo (Portugal). His first India solo at Nature Morte gallery in Delhi brings together works that reflect his long-standing inquiries into material and authority. On view, among others, is Stone Axes Painted White, which reconfigures Neolithic tools as well as a series of Lego works — a material he has used extensively since the mid-2010s — that reimagine paintings by Indian modernists SH Raza and VS Gaitonde into pixel-like grids. In an email interview ahead of his India visit, he reflects on …